I honestly don't even know why they keep doing it. You get less crazies as a prison guard and they have better security.
Insurance is also fragile, where an employee that needs their healthcare for something like cancer is then exposed to be laid off and lose coverage.
When you need it most, you are subjected to exploitation and fraud: surprise billing, lack of coverage, and doctors that feign ignorance about costs and complexities.
Meanwhile anyone that knows how billing professionals knows: #1 rule is bill when you can, the #2 rule is to bill as much as possible.
The end result is a lack of faith in our system, where it is just a system of profiteering and exploitation.
They work long hours because they will eventually make a lot of money (my friend is a cardiologist, not even a surgeon, and makes 800k per year in the US) and get huge amounts of prestige. Doctors are the only nerd profession that is cool and sexy. And the number of hours is actually less than it used to be back in the day.
Of course, you don't get as many perks from the drug/device company reps anymore, or have they figured out how to give doctors steak dinners and golf junkets again?
There is a difference between - will I go to the hospital if I get hurt or have a medical need versus do I trust the hospital to not fleece for some care I may not need. The fact that this question needs to be asked is a result of the lack of trust. If there is any profession where there should have been zero tolerance for malpractice, it is this noble medical profession.
Of course my mom is not asking for a war tribunal to prosecute people. She's talking about the gravity of the facts.
What's stupid is your insistence on trying to imply that a remark she made about the gravity of some acts is the same as her saying it's wartime.
And for what it's worth, yes she actually does know what wartime is.
I wasn't aware it was a requirement to be allowed to express one's concerns about the behavior of some people though and to relate it to despicable behaviors she saw first hand.
This holier-thanthou attitude is very well misplaced. It's also significant you choose to single her out on this and say nothing of Macron who made a war time speech. And Macron has way more influence than my mom.
As for macron he is just like most politicians, he uses this idiotic and misplaced war rethoric to fool people and make it easier to suspend rights and liberties.
Yes, words mean things.
But people use words with variations on their meanings to put emphasis or for comical effects or for anything else every day and that's fine. That's what language is for. My mom thinks it's worse than a criminal act and speaks the words "war crimes" ? Good, that captures and convey her feelings better.
You may not like it but people do that all the time and they also make analogies that aren't 100% logical 1-1 mappings to what they are trying to explain.
Better get used to it and keep this word definition rhetoric tactics for people who wants to argue on this level.
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.12.27.21268278v...
> For households with the Omicron VOC, the corresponding OR for infection for unvaccinated individuals was 1.04 (CI: 0.87-1.24) and 0.54 (CI: 0.40-0.71) for booster-vaccinated individuals.
2) Keeping hospitals from being overwhelmed and keeping people from dying is a legitimate goal of vaccination, even in the absence of any reduction in transmission. The vaccine remains effective at this. Hospitalization rates for the unvaccinated are leagues higher than the vaccinated.
The paper you quote shows two-dose vaccination (or previous infection) increasing the secondary attack rate from 29% (unvaccinated) to 32%, i.e. worse than nothing. Only a booster reduces it back to 25%.
My guess is that the increase is not due to direct biochemical effects of vaccination/prior infection, but due to people assuming that they're protected and taking fewer precautions. Demographic differences might also play a role.
> After adjustment for confounders, we found that in households with the Delta VOC, the OR of infection was 2.31 (95% confidence interval (CI) 2.09-2.55) for unvaccinated individuals and 0.38 (CI: 0.32-0.46) for booster-vaccinated individuals when compared to fully vaccinated potential secondary cases. For households with the Omicron VOC, the corresponding OR for infection for unvaccinated individuals was 1.04 (CI: 0.87-1.24) and 0.54 (CI: 0.40-0.71) for booster-vaccinated individuals.
For delta, two dose vaccination helps. For Omicron, there is no statistically significant effect of two dose vaccination.
In no case is there an increase from two dose vaccination of attack rates.
That means there’s a big side effect from people not getting vaccinated: the healthcare system has finite capacity and when it’s full of people who wouldn’t be there if they’d been vaccinated, that means space isn’t available for anyone who has some other problem and the healthcare system is losing a lot of expensively trained people due to stress. It is extra hard on them to watch people die for avoidable reasons and many nurses, doctors, etc. have left at least temporarily due to burnout.
So 5% of the population represents 50% of ICU ventilator capacity.
https://ourworldindata.org/covid-vaccinations https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2020/health/covid-va... https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/world/covid-vaccina...
https://covidactnow.org/ uses “at least one dose” for the national map but breaks out their state-level displays as “1+” and “fully vaccinated”.
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.12.27.21268278v...
> Our results show that the Omicron VOC is generally 2.7-3.7 times more infectious than the Delta VOC among vaccinated individuals (Table 3). This observation is in line with data from (18), which estimated that 19% of Omicron VOC primary cases in households in the UK resulted in at least one other infection within the household, compared to only 8.3% of those associated with the Delta VOC. Furthermore, we show that fully vaccinated and booster-vaccinated individuals are generally less susceptible to infection compared to unvaccinated individuals (Table 2). We also show that booster-vaccinated individuals generally had a reduced transmissibility (OR: 0.72, CI: 0.56-0.92), and that unvaccinated individuals had a higher transmissibility (OR: 1.41, CI: 1.27-1.57), compared to fully vaccinated individuals.
> Surprisingly, we observed no significant difference between the SAR of Omicron versus Delta among unvaccinated individuals (Table 3). This indicates that the increased trans-missibility of the Omicron VOC primarily can be ascribed to immune evasion rather than an inherent increase in the basic transmissibility.
That last part is why the boosters matter: neutralizing antibodies (which your body stops producing over time after the infection) can prevent someone from getting sick at all, whereas the longer-lasting T cell response helps your immune system fight it off more effectively. If the entire population is boosted, that would have been plenty to fight off Delta but with Omicron we still need a combination of other measures (masks, air filtering/exchange, etc.) and eventually updated boosters to put an end ot it. That doesn't mean that being vaccinated isn't worthwhile, of course: you're still far more likely to have a better outcome if you get it and the window where you're contagious is smaller.
We can't put an end to this virus. It will be around at some level forever.
Once it's spreading at a lower level, your risk of personal exposure is much lower and the long-lasting T cell response becomes more of a focus because that reduces risk to the person and you're less worried about the crunch of many thousands of people showing up at the hospital at the same time because for someone vaccinated it's more like something like influenza where most people have a bad week or two but don't urgently need medical treatment.
keyword being if and meaningfully.
Anyway that fake recipient may still need top notch expensive care to stay alive if he doesn't get mild covid. Are you suggesting that he should pay in full for those care since you state it only harms the fake recipient ?
Also, it increasingly seems that a third dose significantly increases protection against omicron.
Early evidence is that the protection against transmission from the booster appears to be quite fleeting (weeks, not months), so the main reason to vaccinate is really to protect yourself.
People seem to forget much of the world still has no access to vaccines. Every person being vaccinated with natural immunity is someone without immunity missing that vaccine.
https://www.kcra.com/article/nurses-react-covid-19-protocols...
So is France and Canada.
I'm not sure what you're asking. Are you saying that antibodies last 90 days to 6 months? Firstly that's incorrect as antibodies seem to be detectable even after 8 months in the study I'm remembering, but more importantly your immune system is made up of many parts and antibodies are not the primary response to coronaviruses since the antibodies do fade rather quickly.
Instead the many other parts of our immune system are extremely long lived with other coronaviruses and there's no reason to expect they won't be extremely long lived with covid.
In fact the reason you see so many asymptomatic cases with covid is because of preexisting natural immunity to similar coronaviruses.
> If they incubate a new variant themselves are they willing to be held personally liable?
Are you suggesting if we had the tech (we don't) to trace down the exact host where a virus mutates into a recognizably different strain that host should be liable? I think you should really reflect on exactly that would mean and exactly how harmful that would be for society. You do realize every single person in the entire world will either die in the next couple of years or without a doubt be attacked by covid, right? That means you'd basically be putting up a lottery system to see who gets to lose for being "ground zero" for a new variant mutation. This would be completely pointless and would serve only to hurt people with zero chance of helping anyone.
To me this is a huge problem: some doctors are gaming the system and providing fake covid certificates or vaccination stamps. What else could doctors be hiding from me in other situations ? My mom said it was a war crime to deliver fake covid vaccination stamps (I can see how a doctor doing that would see himself as a resistant so good luck having a healthy debate about that). It breaks something fundamental. In a way I hope most of them did it for the money rather than out of anti-vax/anti-system.
On a related note I was stuck for three days in a house during this summer's flood (floor level flooded, second okay, I stayed at the third) . I had food, water and was okay. At some point I could have left the house to be relocated in a roofed sport centre or a school with other people but I decided against it in fear of getting covid in a crowded space. It was before omicron. Maybe I overreacted but I didn't want to take any risks.